Formatting your APA citations -- Text version
Penfield Library’s webpage Citing Your Sources has many links to helpful information on properly formatting your APA citations, both in-text and for reference lists at the end of your paper. Below are a couple of screen shots from this page.
There are several links to APA Style guides that you might want to explore to improve your understanding of proper citation details. The Penfield Library Handout is up-to-date and serves as the Oswego standard for APA citation formatting.
When you are creating your list of works cited, attention to detail is the key!! You will need to include all the required pieces of information (including author, title, volume, etc.), put them in the proper order, and use the required capitalization and punctuation. The Penfield Library handout offers tips and examples to help you create accurate and complete citations.
I think the most challenging type of resource to cite is an electronic article, because the rules are a bit complex unless you have a .pdf version of the article. If not, look at your article and try to find the new DOI (Digital Object Identifier). If you want to look at these examples now, link to this APA Style Guide and look at page 4. Remember to contact me or AskALibrarian if you have any questions – we’ve all had lots of experience helping with citations!
Page 1 of this APA Style Guide gives you instruction on inserting in-text references, which you will need to use when you either quote or paraphrase someone else’s idea. These are much simpler citations, including only the author’s name, publication date and page number. The purpose of this information is to direct the reader to the works cited list, where full details on the resource are available.
Another very popular citation tool is the “citation builder” (image below from Citing Your Sources page). These provide a template, based on the type of resource you specify, into which you type all of the needed information. I recommend these because they help you remember what information is needed. But THEY ALL MAKE MISTAKES, so if you choose to start with a citation builder be sure to proof your citations using the Penfield Library APA Guide. The most accurate right now is NoodleBib Express, although it takes a bit longer to walk you through the process than the others. If you find you like creating your citations using one of these tools, you will quickly learn what errors to look for and how to correct them.
And one final word of caution -- DO NOT use citations formatted by ERIC or other databases. Unfortunately they are rarely accurate, and correcting them usually takes me more time than starting from scratch!